Susan Sontag: My life spent as an American abroad

Taken from a talk given by the American novelist and critic at the Charleston Festival in East Susse

There is always a little bit of an embarrassment being an American, because America is such a greedy, overbearing culture and it exercises such incredible influence on every other place. I am not big on the sentiment of patriotism, but I think it is hardest of all, for me anyway, to be identified with the American thing.

It is also true that I have spent a lot of my adult life out of the United States. which has made the rest of the world very real to me and the rest of the world is not the United States. I don't mean just the UK or Western Europe, places like that, that are in a continuity with what is in the States, but places that are really different.

I have had some very profound experiences in Asian countries. I spent a good part of three years in a place that is part of Europe, but is very far in terms of comforts and self-confidence from America, namely Sarajevo during the years of the siege, where I was living between 1993-96.

It is very important for me to be a foreigner. I feel I understand my country much better. Americans are very good at being foreigners. A cosmopolitan American is really cosmopolitan. We throw ourselves into it in a certain way. It is a very complicated destiny to be an American.

Naturally, as you could imagine, I am in a state of horror and despair about the present administration and lots of things that are going on, but that goes without saying. I am not required to identify with my own government. I do find this President-select a rather awful figure ­ what he has brought, what he presumes and the rest of it.

I feel international, but I know that the way in which I feel international is also very American. I am hinged to my own time and I did grow up in the US. I am a third-generation American, so of course there are very American things about me. It isn't about what I identify with in American culture ­ most of which I really don't like, or don't care about, or don't get much pleasure from. It is partly what is American in me. I have learnt that living abroad. For instance, I am a great believer in willpower and in the possibility of self-transformation and self-transcendence. I have discovered living in many European countries and some other countries outside of Europe, that other people don't think that. They don't think that you can re-make yourself, transform yourself, transcend yourself and by an enormous effort of will become somebody else. This is very American. There is an American part that is basic to my character and I'm never going to change that. Actually, I think it has worked for me, but I am aware of how American it is.

Why am I a writer, as opposed to some other thing, because I have lots and lots of interests? It is partly a way of being a citizen of the world. The world being some idea of an international republic of letters. I could feel much more connected with writers in other countries perhaps, than I do with most writers in my own country. It is a way of being international. It is a way of paying attention to the world. That is, again, an American idea, but I'm not very chauvinistic, to put it mildly.

I'm not sending any messages. There was a review of my book in America which particularly irritated me. It said "The novel is very interesting, lively and original, but Sontag doesn't have any new ideas about America." That was the big criticism and I thought: there are no new ideas about America! Of course I don't have any new ideas about America.

America is a place that a lot of people have done a lot of thinking about and I quite sincerely believe there are no new ideas about America. I think you could put the old ideas in different combinations, emphasise some and discard others, but to have a whole new idea? Nonsense, it can't be done.

And I don't think that a novel is the correct vehicle. Your most basic convictions, concerns and passions enter into a novel, but a novel is a poor vehicle for social commentary.